Uncollected Thoughts: Batman vs Superman – Dawn of Justice

He’s not in this one, but you sure wish he was.

I spent most of the Easter weekend avoiding specific spoilers for this film, but I’d have needed to lock myself in a monastic cell to have avoided picking up the impression that the general reaction to Batman vs Superman – Dawn of Justice was that it was dull, overlong, tedious and an incomprehensible piece of crap.

Never let consensus, or the critics, get in the way of you enjoying a film, so I took Easter Monday afternoon out to watch it (in 3D, natch) at Grand Central, Stockport. And my take on the film is that it is dull, overlong, tedious and an incomprehensible piece of crap.

This from a comics geek who has known these characters for a lifetime, who is a DC fan who desperately wants to see his age-old favourites soar on film the way that Marvel’s lot do. I confess that I was bored after thirty minutes of this two-and-a-half hour long film, yes, bored, complete lack of interest in the story, would have switched it off had I been sat at home and gone and done something more interesting instead: the pots need washing, for one thing.

What makes this film suck so? There are several factors: in no particular order it’s the acting, the direction, the dialogue, the story: no, it’s unfair to drag the story in on this, since there was none, just a never-ending succession of scenes with no logical succession, interplay or sense of cohesion, no more so than in the ending, which never came because the film didn’t have one, and kept coming up with more and dumber scenes to try and hide the fact that it had no idea, not one, about how to stop without the actors having to band together and back off-set, shuffling their feet and whistling to conceal the absence of an end-line, like a sketch in a Spike Milligan Q series, except that he was making a deliberate point.

Let’s try to make some sense of this, though if I do, it’s more than Director Zack Snyder ever tried. His is the bold, dominant supervening vision for the entire DC Cinematic Universe, which suggests the whole of it is going to be shitty, dark, uninspired splodge.

The story is as I said: no story at all, just a collection of scenes in some form of sequence, but without connection or progression. It starts during an extended sequence set in Man of Steel, which I did not watch, where Bruce Wayne goes tearing around Metropolis, trying unsuccessfully to rescue his employees from the Wayne Building. This makes him very much not-friends with Superman, who he leaves alone for eighteen months because he’s so concerned about the danger a Kryptonian could be to the world.

Then he decides to go after him by stealing the kryptonite that Lex Luthor intends to use against Superman, and for exactly the same reason. It takes forever to get to in the film, and when it finally happens, long after the point when it was getting hard to take how this thing was being dragged out by jerky shit and stupid dream sequences, Batman whups Superman’s kryptonite-weakened ass and is all set to stab him through the heart when – and everybody has pointed out just how risible this is so I won’t go on about it – Supes happens to mention that his mother is called Martha.

Batman staggers back in shock. “That was my mother’s name” he cries, a la Rupert Holmes in the deliberately silly song, ‘Our National Pastime’ and just like that they’re pals and best buddies.

Which is when Luthor scares up a Kryptonian monster out of nothing and Snyder, having made a ham-fisted attempt to do ‘The Dark Knight’, now crosses over into a ludicrously inept retread of the ‘Death of Superman’. Wonder Woman appears out of nowhere to help take down the bad guy, but it doesn’t stop Superman getting killed (though with Henry Cavill’s ‘acting’, who can possibly tell?)

That’s about as much logical sense as the movie contains, to be frank. Superman’s death is the cue for Batman to enlist Wonder Woman in putting together the future Justice League: because he has ‘a feeling’. It’s going to be an utter disaster, I know it.

It’s a sludgy, horribly slow film with no narrative direction, it’s murky in nearly ever scene and the CGI is so OTT that in any vaguely realistic estimate, there should be no more than about 4% of Metropolis and Gotham collectively left with one brick on top of the other.

Cavill is a bust as Superman and Clark Kent. He can’t act: neither character has any life in him and Superman’s habit of just standing there, letting destruction go on around him until he feels he’s given his pose enough burn time is stupid. Gal Gadot does an efficient job as Wonder Woman in the climactic fight but everywhere else is wooden and artificial. Jesse Eisenberg, as Luthor, is no Luthor I ever saw in my lifetime, and I will need to do a hell of a lot of work to remove that performance from my memory: it was the single biggest idiocy in the film and believe me, that’s saying a lot.

In contrast, Ben Affleck gave a perfectly good performance as Bruce Wayne. I was less impressed with him as Batman, but then Batman was an old car crash and the costume was nearly as bad as Adam West’s.

I refused to watch Man of Steel three years ago, for what seemed to me to be very good reasons, and the same reasons applied to this film. To paraphrase what I paraphrased then, characters like Superman and Batman have been around for decades. They have been interpreted in many different ways as the world develops about them, ways that are mutually contradictory in multiple ways. We each of us, mostly unconsciously, pick out certain aspects of the characters that form our acceptance of them, a core that we us to decide if a performance ‘is’ or ‘is not’ Superman.

‘My’ Superman does not kill, deliberately. He is too conscious of the extent of his powers and he eternally believes that there is a better way, to win without killing. That’s why I didn’t watch Man of Steel.

When it comes to this film, ‘my’ Batman doesn’t kill either, especially not indiscriminately, and he does NOT pick up guns. And ‘my’ Alfred never – never, never, never – appears unshaven. And no Lex Luthor under the sun behaves like this one.

Put it all together, the film sucked. For once, the critics who turned up their noses and sniffed got it dead right. I’m one of us, I’m on the inside, these films speak my language, I get them, I’m not missing the point. And I thought it was shite, it was a waste of my money and of the hours I have remaining to me, and if Zack Snyder is to stay in charge of the DC Cinematic Universe, if this is what it’s going to be like, then every one of them lined up to come, all down the line, are going to be wastelands, disasters, horrendous mistakes.

I will never again, except under the most strict of duress, not even with a promise of extraordinary sexual reward, watch this heap of crap again.

Post navigation

My favourite film critic, Leonard Maltin, who usually gives a fair and balanced criticism, summed up this film in two words, “It sucks”. When his daughter asked him if there was anything in it that he liked, he said, “No”. That is the worst review he has ever given in over forty years.